Shahrazad and Resistance:

Strategies of the Dispossessed

Ferial J. Ghazoul

I will try to explain in this article the significance of Shahrazad now,

at this very critical moment. How can a story, so unrealistic, help us
confront our confusing reality? How can Shahrazad – this imaginary and
fictional character – come to our aid and give us light in the dark tunnel
we find ourselves locked into?
Perhaps our impotence and paralysis in front of the global tyranny
that is crushing us and promising even more violence and wars, is not
very different in essence from the situation of the female citizens of
Shahrayar’s Kingdom – where one by one, they are rounded, deflowered,
and then killed. Shahrazad, however, comes along and manages against
all odds not only to survive, but through her very survival, saves her
fellow women. Perhaps we have to look into the deeper meaning of her
actions and of her position to figure out how a lone woman can block
the aggression of such a powerful king as Shahrayar.
Myths, fables, and folktales are narratives engendered by collective
imagination. They constitute an indirect discourse which explains how
things came to be, how relations are, and how we can confront our
universe. Take for example the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, the
earliest extant literary text. Essentially, it tells us how helpless man is
against death. Gilgamesh, heroic and semi-divine, is also every man and
every woman who has been bereaved by the loss of a dear one. His story
teaches us the inevitability of death and of resignation to loss.

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 The frame story of The One Thousand and One Nights poses a differ-
ent problem and proposes a different answer, not that of inevitability but
that of possibility, not of resignation but of struggle. While the narrative
of Gilgamesh raises existential and philosophical issues in the grave style
of the epic, the story of Shahrazad raises political questions about power
and empowerment in the light style of comic and ironic folktales. Gil-
gamesh is then about the irreversibility of the tragic, Shahrazad is about
its reversibility, about the possibility of change, about healing and recov-
ering, about hope in a hopeless world. Gilgamesh the manly hero fails
because he sets out to vanquish death; Shahrazad the womanly heroine
succeeds because she sets out to defer death.
Myths, and particularly Greek myths, have been interpreted to explain
the origins of something or other. Freud used the fate of Oedipus as a
mythic equation of what he called the Oedipus complex, the excessive
attachment or desire of a boy to his mother. Camus found existential
significance in the myth of Sisyphus. Nietzsche explained the birth of
tragedy by the encounter of two gods, Dionysos and Apollo, standing for
the two impulses of intoxication and reason, of chaos and order. More
recently, the Italian writer Italo Calvino, in his first memo for our mil-
lennium, invoked the myth of the petrifying gaze of Medusa: the hero
Perseus managing to cut her head by avoiding to look at her directly.
Instead, he locates her image in the reflection on his bronze shield. Thus
Perseus „fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision,
1 Calvino (1988), 4. an image caught in a mirror“.1 Calvino is tempted to see in this myth an
2 Conrad (1995), 85. allegory of the poet’s relationship to the world. If we stare at the Medusa,
we will be petrified, become paralyzed and then we could only articulate
Kurtz’s final words in Heart of Darkness: „The horror! The horror!“.2 To
overcome the horror of our world, Calvino suggests lightness, a sort of
ironic liberation from weighty burdens. But our Shahrazad offers another
way of overcoming the horrors of her world: With creativity and wit,
with strategy and patience she provides a deliverance for herself and her
fellow citizens.
When Arab writers and critics integrate a mythical element in their
work, it is usually either Greco-Roman or ancient Near Eastern. In par-
ticular myths treating rebirth, regeneration, or renaissance – those associ-
ated with Tammuz, the Mesopotamian god, and corresponding to Adonis
and his rebirth – are deployed in poetry. So is the Pharaonic myth of Isis
and Osiris used in narratives indicating rebirth through reunification.
Clearly the collective urge to self-renewal, to reunite a fragmented collec-

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tive world is behind the recall of these myths and their revival. However,
the story of Shahrazad has hardly been explored as a myth, as a fictional
structure that works as a paradigm and a model for resistance. Yet, it lends
itself precisely to such a theme. There is something splendid and unique
about the story of Shahrazad. It is a secular myth. There are no gods run-
ning about. Yes, there is a demon, ÝifrÐt or mÁrid in the frame story, but
he is the embodiment of a superman, of a very powerful male, who – just
the same and not withstanding his power – is a cuckold. He is fooled
by the woman he kidnapped and imprisoned in a box with seven locks.
Shahrazad herself, in trying to overcome her fate as a woman destined
to be crushed, does not appeal to the divine and does not prepare magic
potions. Instead, she uses her mind, she uses her human intelligence and
creativity in order to combat a formidable adversary. There are no mir-
acles that transform the situation. There is only hard labor that makes the
difference; hard labor indeed, but also calculated and clever labor. The
frame story – and I am not here referring to the stories which Shahrazad
narrates to Shahrayar, but her very own story – is secular par excellence.
The agent of change is furthermore a woman, a member of a dispos-
sessed gender in the context of a patriarchal society. She is a member of
a weaker sex, and yet it is precisely she who reverses the situation.
I will go over the frame story quickly and dwell more in my analysis
on the segments dealing with Shahrazad to unpack their significance. The
frame story in The One Thousand and One Nights is made up of four narrative
blocks. The first deals with Shahrayar and his brother Shahzaman and how
they both discovered the adultery of their respective wives with black slaves.
The second narrative block is that of a quest: Shahrayar and Shahzaman
go on a voyage to find out if their case is exceptional or follows a general
rule. In their voyage they come across a maiden imprisoned by a demon
under seven locks so that she could not possibly commit adultery behind
his back. She, nevertheless, manages to do exactly that while he sleeps next
to her. She literally forces a frightened Shahrayar and a scared Shahzaman
to make love to her and informs them of the hundreds of lovers she has
had and from whom she has kept ring tokens. At this point, Shahrayar
goes back to his country, puts his adulterous wife to death and sets out to
punish and terrorize all innocent women of his kingdom. For three years,
Shahrayar marries a virgin every night only to behead her in the morning.
It becomes increasingly difficult to find brides for the demanding and
tyrannical King. The vizier finds it difficult to find more ladies to satisfy
the appetite of the King and goes home sad and worried.

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 The story of Shahrazad constitutes the third block of the frame narrative.
Set within it is the fourth narrative block made up of the fable the vizier
tells his daughter in order to dissuade her from her risky scheme. These two
narrative blocks are indicative of Shahrazad’s strategy and resistance to both
her proscribed destiny and to the conservative discourse of her father.
Let me elaborate: Shahrazad is the elder sister of Dunyazad; they are
the vizier’s daughters. Shahrazad possessed a thousand books „and was
3 Tales from the versed in the wisdom of the poets and the legends of ancient kings“.3
Thousand and One When she sensed her father’s bad mood, after hearing what troubled him,
Nights (1955), 19. she told him: „Give me in marriage to this King: either I shall die and be
4 Tales from the a ransom for the daughters of Moslems, or live and be the cause of their
Thousand and One deliverance“.4
Nights (1955), 19. I will stop the unfolding of the narrative here to comment on the
significance of the main character, Shahrazad, and her above-mentioned
statement. Shahrazad should be seen from two perspectives: her inferior
status as a woman and her superior status as an intellectual, an educated
person with a rich library – an index of superior education. To my mind,
the fact that she is a minister’s daughter, i.e., that she is a woman of the
dominant class, is not in itself of great significance. It is only a way for
presenting an educated woman with a splendid mind. Education and a
rich library are necessarily both based on ample wealth. The emphasis
thus is being put on a cultivated rather than a rich person. As for her gen-
der – though it is very difficult to separate her femininity from her inferior
status in society – what is really of relevance is her social dispossession
and lack of power. In other words, it is not her biological identity but her
social one that is significant. She is dispossessed as a female in the context,
but she is presented as intellectually superior. In the fictional universe of
The One Thousand and One Nights women under the reign of Shahrayar are
dispossessed, and Shahrazad is a dispossessed intellectual. In this term
I find in Shahrazad the characteristics of what Antonio Gramsci called
an „organic intellectual“, i.e. a spokesman for the underprivileged who
takes on the function of an intellectual. Gramsci, furthermore, pointed
out the leading role of the vanguard party in carrying out revolutionary
change, and called that party the „modern prince“, alluding to the role
of the prince as defined by Machiavelli in uniting and controlling. For
Gramsci, Machiavelli’s famous Renaissance prince who is supposed to be
the agent of change turns into the modern communist party, hence the
term of the „modern prince“ as title of his book. In a corresponding vein,
in The One Thousand and One Nights we may perceive Shahrazad as the

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prince or rather the princess who will deliver the dispossessed. But, while
Machiavelli and Gramsci are concerned with techniques and strategies of
gaining political control, our medieval princess Shahrazad is concerned
with techniques and strategies of limiting and reducing political control.
Let us also learn from Shahrazad: She came up with an initiative. She
took a chance. One may also say: She gambled, but not quite. In gambling,
one counts on luck; she counted on her wit. Strikingly, Shahrazad is not
helpless. She does not bemoan the situation and say there is nothing to do
as we often say when confronted with overwhelming forces. Her initiative
is not simply to offer herself to the king in order to save another woman.
It is a scheme to deliver all females if it succeeds. Thus she thinks of a solu-
tion to a general problem. She is not offering herself to the king to save
her sister, Dunyazad, but to deliver the „daughters of the Moslems“.5 Here 5 Tales from the

again the reference is not to a faith but to the totality: Since the context Thousand and One

is Islamic, the expression is „daughters of the Moslems“, for Shahrayar’s Nights (1955), 19.

wrath was falling on his own Moslem citizens. In this particular phrase,
„daughters of the Moslems“ amounts to „daughters of all“, consequently,
there is no sectarian significance to the term „Moslems“ in this context.
What is the reaction of Shahrazad’s father – an equivalent to a
present-day Minister of the Interior – whose role is to capture a woman
a day for his king, to capture a dispossessed person a day for his king?
The vizier tells his daughter a fable. The gist of it is to dissuade her and
simultaneously threaten her not to take an initiative. His discourse is that
of a Minister of the Interior (the threat) and a Minister of Information
(dissuasion). The vizier’s fable is an ideological discourse par excellence,
which neutralizes the people and deflects their initiatives; it perpetuates
impotence and paralysis. The fable appeals to individualistic safety over
the collective deliverance. The message of the fable the vizier narrates is,
as we would phrase it in colloquial Arabic, inti malik? („What does this
have to do with you?“), and should you get involved you will pay for it,
and furthermore if you do not listen you will get beaten up. Is this not
what gets repeated in so many ways, in a variety of discourses, in order
to silence initiatives and protests?
Let us examine the fable the vizier presents his daughter with to per-
suade her to give up, to co-opt her. The fable, though one, is in fact made
up of two parts: that of the Donkey and the Ox and that of the Farmer
and his Wife. The connecting element of the two parts is the Farmer who
understands the language of animals and therefore overhears the conversa-
tion between the Donkey and the Ox.

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 The Ox, in the fable, has found out that the Donkey was much better
off than he himself, because he rarely was called on to carry his master,
the Farmer, while the Ox had to work very hard every day plowing the
farmer’s field. The Ox envied the comfortable and leisurely life of the
Donkey and expressed to him how fortunate he, the Donkey, was and
how unfortunate he, the Ox. The Donkey, trying to help the Ox, advised
him to pretend to be sick, to lie down and to refuse food, and by so
doing, to avoid hard work. The Ox did accordingly, but since the Farmer
had overheard the conversation, he gave orders that the Donkey be used
to replace the Ox in drawing the plow. The Donkey regretted his advice
which got him in trouble while relieving the Ox. So the Donkey tried to
get out of the new situation by telling the Ox that he had better return to
work soon, as the owner intended to have him slaughtered if he contin-
ued to be sick. The next day, the Ox did his best to display appetite when
eating, and showed energy when working. The Farmer who had overheard
these conversations roared with laughter.
The lesson of this fable is very clear: Mind your own business; cul-
tivate your own garden; don’t rock the boat, don’t meddle with general
issues etc., for if you do you will have to pay for it. It is a lesson dis-
seminated by the hegemonic order to make people passive. Gramsci
distinguished between two ways of putting down people: one through the
use of force – police and anti-riot forces, etc. The other, more effective
and less costly, is the use of culture itself to dissuade people from resist-
ance and protest by disseminating an ethos of passivity, of what we call
in street Arabic wana mali? („What business of mine is it?“). Repression
then can be direct through violent means, or indirect through the use of
cultural strategies that co-opt the citizens. The latter include narratives,
proverbs, essays, historiography, theology, etc. – all of which partake in
the hegemonic discourse.
The discourse of the vizier, Shahrazad’s father, is straight from Gram-
sci, avant la lettre. First he presents a narrative that will pacify Shahrazad’s
will and initiative. Then he moves on to the second part of the fable
where he threatens her in a veiled way with violent repercussions: If you
don’t listen, I’ll beat you up, or to translate it to Now: I will shoot you.
First, the father uses a cultural discourse, then he threatens the use of
violent action.
The second part of the fable goes as follows: After the Farmer broke
out laughing having heard what went on between the Donkey and the Ox,
his Wife asked him why he was laughing. He told her that it was a secret,

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a gift he had of understanding non-human languages, and that the revela-
tion of his gift would entail his death. But she insisted on knowing the
secret, even at the cost of her husband’s life. The Farmer did not know
what to do, especially since he loved his Wife dearly. He called on his
relatives and neighbors and told them about his predicament. Everyone
entreated the Wife to abandon her demand, to no avail. So the Farmer
resigned himself to her wish and went to perform his last ablutions before
telling the secret to his Wife which will entail his prompt death. He then
overheard his Dog cursing the Rooster and accusing him of lightheart-
edness and playfulness when his master was about to die. The Rooster
inquired how that had come about and why the Master was about to die.
The Dog told him the story of their Master and his Wife. The Rooster
accused his Master of stupidity on grounds that he could not manage
even one Wife, when he, the Rooster, succeeded in mastering fifty, and
wondered why his Master did not give his Wife a good beating to settle
the issue. The Farmer, having overheard all this, decided to take up the
Rooster’s suggestion. He had some tree branches in his closet and invited
his Wife in, pretending he was about to reveal the secret to her. When she
came in, she got a beating and consequently asked to be pardoned.
This did not impress Shahrazad. She did not give in and was not con-
vinced by the hegemonic lesson entailed by the fable of the Ox and the
Donkey, nor was she intimidated by the veiled threat of a beating. She
said: „Nothing will shake my faith in the mission I am to fulfil“.6 6 Tales from the

The vizier told his daughter Shahrazad that her fate might very well Thousand and One

be that of the Farmer’s Wife. But she insisted on going ahead with her Nights (1955), 21.

plan. Why did her father give in to his stubborn daughter? I think partly
because he himself was threatened by the overall situation. He is, of
course, a close associate of the king, a strategic ally, but then his loyalty
and service to his king and master over the last three years were not
deemed enough. He has to go on performing a task that he can hardly
undertake. Reluctantly, he gives in to his daughter, and this is of course
the proper choice – to allow the oppressed, themselves, to handle the
situation at their own risk rather than repress them further.
Shahrazad had a plan and a strategy. She was not going to confront
directly such an overwhelming power as that of the King. She was going
to deflect his vicious desire. Super power is overwhelming, and to pre-
tend otherwise is futile. Shahrazad understands the power game and she
understands perfectly her own weak situation in the power equation. She
is at Shahrayar’s mercy, and he has no mercy.

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 As Shahrazad is getting prepared for that wedding night, she instructs
her sister Dunyazad that she would be asking for her on the wedding night
and that Dunyazad was to request tales from her sister that night. The plan
is carried out and Shahrazad asks Shahrayar to allow her to narrate stories
as her younger sister requested. He gives his consent, and he is delighted
with her narrative discourse himself. Shahrayar, anxious to hear the end of
her story and more stories, postpones her sentence night after night until
one thousand and one nights have passed, thus the title of the tales.
Let us interpret this segment of the frame story in terms of its impli-
cation. There is complicity and collaboration between the two sisters,
the elder and the younger. They complement each other. They organize
beforehand an action plan, and Shahrazad shares it with her younger
partner. Significantly, Shahrazad does not divulge the scheme to her
father, but to her sister. Genders and generations here stand for repres-
sors and repressed. The father figure is part and parcel of the hegemonic
system while the daughters are its victims. Why is a male associated with
repression? He is not just any male; he is also senior, age-wise, and, as a
vizier, an emblem of power. Patriarchy is precisely this: the repressive rule
of the patriarch. Age, power, and masculinity are necessary attributes of a
patriarch. The women by opposition are the victims of this patriarchy and
they are the ones who scheme together to liberate themselves and other
women folk from the status quo. Let me stress by repeating what I have
already said. The issue, on the deeper level, is not female versus male,
woman versus man. But female and male are used as emblems, as tokens,
of power relations in a given social structure. Naturally, in a patriarchal
society – as the one that produced The One Thousand and One Nights and as
the one that continues to dominate the world – if one wants to use gender
categories to stand for the privileged and the dominant, one uses perforce
‚male‘ as a trope; and if one wants to point to the underprivileged and
down-trodden one uses ,female‘. The choice of allegorical vehicles is nec-
essarily related to connotations in the cultural context.
The collaboration between the two siblings, the older Shahrazad and
the younger Dunyazad, is also indicative of the need for generational
coordination among the disinherited, among the victims. Resistance to
be effective has to bring together the youth along with the more mature
members of a repressed community.
As Shahrazad knows she is powerless in the face of a violent despot,
she chooses not to confront and not to argue. The issue is beyond debate,
beyond rational discourse. Thus what she asks for is deceptively simple and

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temporary: to narrate a tale during the night. Who could refuse such a
modest request? But Shahrazad, if not Shahrayar, knows exactly the likely
implications of granting this request. One tale leads to another and generates
another, and at the dawn of each day the decapitation of Shahrazad is post-
poned for one more day. She is on a death row; she is a dead woman talking.
She does not give up, and every night she weaves a new story – not genuinely
new or original ones, but reworkings of old tales, of folktales. And in this also
is embedded a lesson about creativity: renovating and innovating.
Shahrazad’s request sounds as if it were limited, at least minimal. Her
request, however, resembles the request of the grand vizier in al-YaÝqÙbÐ’s
historical account:
The Grand Vizier Sissa Ben Dahir was granted a boon for hav-
ing invented chess for the Indian King Shirhan. Since the game
is played on a board with 64 squares, Sissa addressed the King:
„Majesty, give me a grain of wheat to place on the first square, and
two grains of wheat to place on the second square, and four grains
of wheat to place on the third, and eight grains of wheat to place on
the fourth, and so, O King, let me cover each of 64 squares of the
board.“ „And is that all you wish, Sissa, you fool?“ exclaimed the
astonished King. „O Sire“, Sissa replied, „I have asked for more
wheat than there is in the whole world, verily, for enough to cover
the whole surface of the earth to the depth of the twentieth part of
a cubit.“7 7 Kasner/Newman

Sissa was right, and the fool was the King who knew not his mathematics. (1967), 173.

This is similar to Shahrazad’s request. Shahrayar thought that Shahrazad’s

request would take no more than a short time. In fact, she had asked for
infinite time, as one story leads to another ad infinitum. This infinity of
time could only be granted as long as Shahrazad kept the King amused
and interested. This in itself tells us something about reception aesthetics.
Literature to be effective must also entertain and captivate. If one night
her story bores the King, her head will be chopped off at dawn.
What can we conclude from all this? The crucial test of a discourse,
in the arts or literature, is to engage the listeners, the audience, or the
spectators. Such an achievement is not a solution to dilemmas once for
all. It is not an argument that can undo an injustice, but a tool in which
the unjust verdict is postponed indefinitely. In the end, in the very
end, a virtual end, on the thousand and first night, Shahrayar pardons
Shahrazad and her dispossessed fellow women and stops being a serial
killer. But this only happens at some projected time in a new millennium.

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 The unfolding of The One Thousand and One Nights stories takes place in
the present tense: Shahrazad has to keep creating narratives. The struggle
against hegemony is practically endless. Creativity and articulation are
the main elements in Shahrazad’s project. But creativity and articulation
should not be confined to the literary and the verbal. One can articulate
by expressing oneself in ways that reach beyond the verbal. There is
visual articulation through dress and emblems. Creativity is not some-
thing restricted to literature and the arts; there is creativity in the course
of a struggle and there is creativity in charting the road of resistance.
Shahrazad teaches us that the road of survival is fraught with mines, that
we need to be alert and creative in avoiding the boredom and fatigue of
our constituency, and she teaches us that the road is infinitely long and
we need to have what we call in Arabic al-nafas al-ÔawÐl (the long breath),
that is stamina.
Shahrazad’s story can be read as a political parable, an allegory of the
dispossessed resisting what seems to be an inevitable doom and thus can
serve us as a model for action and organization in these difficult times.
Yet, it is by no means a recipe which we can use to overcome our paraly-
sis. How this paradigm is to be translated into action here and now, is left
to the creativity of modern day Shahrazads.

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